Follow Your Bliss

Loving and hating IDE's... also:
Weblogs: Hazards of old IDE's, IDEA cleverness, and properties as design feature
java.net Poll: What one feature would you most like to see in JDK 7?
Java Today: Semblance 1.0b2, NetBeans 2007 predictions, and Nonprofit Software Development Summit
Forum postings: Closures for LINQ-like queries, native queries, and finding multiple installed JRE's

Loving and hating IDE's

It's hard sometimes to understand the devotion some developers have to their favorite tools, especially IDE's. But the serious user will tell you that they are severely impaired without their IDE of choice. A poll from last year, How dependent are you on your IDE?[2], showed that only 20% thought they'd be fine without it. So what's the big deal? Two blogs today speak to the benefits of modern tools, and their absence in old ones.

KirillÂ Grouchnikov has some C++ work that forces him to useYe old faithful IDE[3], and he reports a striking difference.
"Going back to work in IDE that's four years old... Now, back in the day (VS 6.0), i didn't notice it, but now, coming back from Eclipse / NetBeans / IDEA, this looks like an old relic from The Stone Age."

Meanwhile, BenÂ Galbraith says I Love Intelligent Tools...[4], and reports
"after years of use, IntelliJ IDEA still makes me smile." Specifically, he notes how IDEA caught him trying to pass a variable called width to a parameter named height.

Also in today's Weblogs[5].
CayÂ Horstmann makes the case for properties support in Java in his blogProperties are Design Features[6]:
"The discussion about properties had reached a fever pitch in the last weeks, and there is a great deal of dissent about the nature of properties. Are they meant for tools, are they the tool of the devil to seduce us away from the goodness of OO, or are they just an irrelevant preoccupation of programmers who have no tolerance for boilerplate? In this blog, I would like to argue that properties are legitimate design features, and that it is the job of a programming language to allow faithful mapping of design intent to code."

Speaking of proposed features, the latest java.net Poll[7] asks "What one feature would you most like to see in JDK 7?" Cast your vote on the front page, then visit the results page[8] for current tallies and discussion.

A note on availability: Friday, 1/19, from 10 PM to midnight (PST), we will add a new router to enhance network availability. You may experience latencies or intermittant access during this time. Our apologies for any inconvenience.

In Java Today[9],
the Semblance[10]
project is pleased to announce the release of Semblance 1.0 beta 2[11]. This release
addresses a Struts 1.3 compatiblity issue in the StrutsLive framework, and provides
fixes for several defects, including a potential memory leak. Version 1.0 provides Struts 1.x developers
with a number of powerful capabilities that had previously been available only in advanced,
component-based frameworks such asTapestry[12]. The new functionality piggy-backs on StrutsLive's existing feature set --
including automatic validation, formatting, bean population, error
messaging, and field label highlighting -- to radically streamline Struts
development.

What does 2007 hold for NetBeans and Java? We have asked six NetBeans experts to look ahead and make predictions for 2007. Our subjects -- two Evangelists, an Architect, an Editor, a Writer and a Community Manager -- have different ideas on what they think is coming up on the horizon this year for NetBeans and the field of Java.

The 2007 Nonprofit Software Development Summit, being held February 21-23 in Oakland, CA, will be a first-of-its-kind convening to bring together the range of developers, technologists, managers, eRiders, integrators, users and other practitioners who self-identify under the umbrella of "nonprofit software development". The event will provide an opportunity both to gather as a community and to take stock of the field, while building connections and capacity.

integerated query in java like linq[14]:
"The C# LINQ facility is composed of a number of language features that work together. The most obvious of these are closures and extensions methods. In the design of the Java closures language proposal, the authors explicitly looked at use cases that correspond to the kind of things supported by LINQ (and its predecessors in other languages) to ensure that Java closures will be able to support the same kinds of things. Closures alone are not sufficient to get the full expressiveness, but they are a critical component."

Another option is proposed by mjablonski, who says:Have a look at Native Queries[15]
"There's an very interesting concept called "Native Queries" (see paper by William Cook and Carl Rosenberger[16]), which seems to be a more OO-like "Howto-build-a-query-syntax-into-Java"-solution than LINQ. You'll use "plain old Java" to express your query and a query-optimizer analyses the byte-code of the expression at runtime and builds up an approriate query against your database."

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Loving and hating IDE's

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